Of upcoming "ATK Boston Eats" food festival and move to new headquarters, Cook's Illustrated's new editor in chief is excited about the company's growth

Greg Sullivan Herald News Staff Reporter

BOSTON – Dan Souza wears many hats, many aprons, many shirts for America’s Test Kitchen. Armed with an analytical mind, a gift for creativity, and a love for cooking, Souza relishes his role in helping to take ATK to new heights.

A native of Cambridge and resident of Jamaica Plain, Souza, 35, will be quite visible this weekend when America’s Test Kitchen hosts its first food festival, Boston Eats, at its amazing new home in the Seaport District. ATK fans may best know him as one of the test chefs who appears, from time to time, on ATK’s PBS TV shows “America’s Test Kitchen” and “Cook’s Country” This year, he was also named Editor-in-Chief of ATK’s popular magazine “Cook’s Illustrated.”

Souza last week was kind enough to carve more than a few minutes out of his busy schedule at the new headquarters (he was roaming the hallways on a borrowed hover board) to talk to GateHouse Media about himself, about “America’s Test Kitchen,” and about this weekend’s “Boston Eats” festival.

GS: What is it like moving from ATK’s longtime, cramped Brookline home to this 55,000-square-foot facility in the Seaport District?

DS: “I can’t overstate how awesome it is, just understanding what we came from. Our original test kitchen, which we’ve been in since the very beginning, 2,500 square feet, which sounds significant, especially if you’re considering the size of your home kitchen. Our new (facility), we essentially have three or four kitchens totaling about 15,000 square feet. So it’s incredible. Some of it we’ve already filled because we were just working on top of each other in the old space. But we’re a very scrappy group of people, and so we got a lot done. Everyone would come in and tour the old space is, like, amazing we did what we did.”

“So this finally feels like we’re home. We’ve really reached a place where it matches what we do and what we produce. That’s fantastic. We’re much more comfortable. But it gives us an opportunity to expand and do a lot more. In the old place we would shut down production to produce the TV show. So for three weeks we wouldn’t do anything else but produce America’s Test Kitchen. That causes a lot of problems. That’s a really tough situation. Now we can film the TV show and develop recipes at the same time. We can shoot a video. The only kind of bottleneck now is manpower. The space is no longer an issue, which is ideal.”

GS: What is it like to be editor-in-chief of Cook’s Illustrated?

DS: “I’m still kind of settling in and over the moon about it. I originally came to America’s Test Kitchen because I loved Cook’s Illustrated growing up. My mom has stacks of old issues of Cook’s Illustrated so I loved it forever. I came here (ATK) because I wanted to be a test cook, which is kind of an entry-level position in the magazine as you develop the recipes. That’s what I wanted to do. I started on the book team … because there weren’t any open spots on Cook’s Illustrated. I did that for a year-and-a-half, which is great. You get an overview. Then I moved over too Cooks Illustrated, which was a dream. So to say that was my dream, it really was, and the fact I’m now I’m in charge of that magazine that I loved so much, that I wanted to work on so badly, is like yeah, I’m very happy about it.”

“And there’s a ton of opportunity. Best food publication, period, for 25 years. We’re going to continue to do that. There will be some small evolutions. The formula works really well and people really love it. We spend eight weeks developing each recipe. We just go super deep, which is what I love to do. We have a crazy attention to detail. We go really deep and we come up with surprising discoveries all the time. We really put together recipes people can go to time and time again.”

GS: What about your online presence?

DS: “We have a ton of opportunity in the digital sphere. We’re rolling out a couple really great new things on our website. We’re going to have commenting. We’re going to have nutritional information very soon. A much bigger sense of community on the site. I think CI.com, ATK.com Cook’s Country, that kind of grouping together, you can do a multi-site membership. That will be the greatest food community on the internet, once we get all the stuff up to speed. We really want our website to have the same feeling of quality and depth and everything that our magazine does. We’ve made little bits of progress over time, but we’re doing a big, deep dive into it now, putting a lot of resources behind it. I’m super excited to see where CI.com goes. I think we have a lot of opportunities in terms of social media and video we really couldn’t do a lot with in the old space, that we can really max out here.”

GS: What are your feelings about this weekend’s “Boston Eats Festival”?

DS: “It’s really awesome. So basically what we’ve done for a long time is we’ve been doing recipe development and really focusing on food for 25 years. And we’ve been in this little spot in Brookline Village where we’ve just kind of dug in and been very, kind of, focused inward. So what’s really awesome about this move is we’re so much more a part of the Boston community. And the food festival is a perfect example. We’re working with the best Boston area chefs especially on our first night, called the Taste of Innovation.”

“I’m paired up with Jeremy Sewall of Island Creek Oyster Bar and a number of other great restaurants in Boston. So we have the same star ingredient. We’re both working with lobster. But he’s going to do his take on it, which is going to be much fancier and kind of restaurant stuff. We’re going to do our classic lobster roll. So people can come through and taste them side-by-side. And we’re repeating that formula with different test cooks and Boston’s best chefs. So it’s a really fun melding of super-analytical approach we take to food and some of the most creative chefs in Boston.”

GS: You are known for your scientific knowledge of food and cooking, right down to molecular activity. Where did that come from?

DS: “As a kid I always liked science a lot. Liked science classes, but was never really head over heels about it. It was when I got into food and went to the Culinary Institute of America for culinary school, it was there that I started asking a lot of questions. More whys than hows. They show you a lot of hows, like this is how you break down a chicken, this is how you sauté, this is how steam, this is how you boil. But there’s not a lot of why behind that. And that’s pretty traditional classical cuisine. It’s pretty hierarchal. You do it just because you’re supposed to do it that way. In asking a lot of those why questions, it just kind of naturally bleeds into the realm of science because so much of what we do is in particular chemistry. There’s physics involved. There’s biology when you talk about the ingredients’ cells. So you start digging into that and it almost gives you sort of that x-ray vision into your food. If you understand the proteins in an egg -- white vs. the yolk, the different temperatures at which those protein set -- you can have more control over how you cook your egg.”

GS: Where does all that America’s Test Kitchen test food go?

DS: “We have what is called a take home fridge. And it’s this big beautiful thing. It’s one of the best perks of working at America’s Test Kitchen. So when we do all of our tastings, they’re tastings. We do small portions. We taste throughout the day. You don’t want to get filled up when you’re trying to taste and be very discerning with food. So we eat a small portion of it and everything else gets packed up into Tupperware, deli containers and it goes into the take home fridge. So anyone else in the company, and we’ve got over 200 people in the company now, can go in there any time of day, open it up, see what’s in there, and take it home, either for lunch or for dinner.”

“It’s a mixed bag. When we start our recipe (testing) early on the food isn’t always very good. We say that we make the mistakes so you don’t have to. And it’s totally true. We try to beat up recipes. … So it’s a bit of a Russian roulette.”